Do Commies Think They're Playing With Kids?

Marvel Comics’ second groundbreaking title, The Incredible Hulk, was very much a work in progress.

In fact, it’s interesting to consider the several contradictory ways in which this character — conceived by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Frankenstein — might have evolved.

For the first two issues, the Hulk is definitely a monster, while his alter ego Bruce Banner is the protagonist (a relationship DC Comics would echo with Eclipso). The Hulk muses about seizing an alien spaceship and using it to rain terror on humanity, and there’s a dark hint that Betty Ross might be threatened with rape, a possibility that always loomed in the monster movies that the Hulk echoed.

Of course, Banner was almost as much antihero as hero. Although he risked his life and destroyed his future happiness to save a teenage stranger from a bomb blast, he was also cold and haughty scientist. And Banner had, after all, invented a gamma bomb that could potentially wipe out human civilization in a nuclear war. Seen in perspective, that made Banner far more dangerous than the Hulk.

Was the curse of the Hulk, somehow, his fated punishment?

Ah, those poignant, haunting Kirby scenes — his teenage pal Rick Jones, slumped and exhausted, keeping a lonely all-night vigil in an underground chamber as the caged, angry Hulk pounded relentlessly on the thick metal vault door behind him.

In the third issue, the Hulk discovered he had the power of virtual flight, and Jones discovered he had the power to telepathically control the Hulk when the military’s attempt to exile the monster into space went awry.

Putting Jones in the driver’s seat increased possibilities for reader identification — readers could now imagine that they commanded the strongest being on Earth. And the monster was now a robot-like force for good who corralled the Ringmaster’s Circus of Crime.

The character’s course seemed set — and was immediately changed with the fourth issue (Nov. 1962). Marvel certainly kept readers on their toes.

Now the Hulk regained his free will and some of Banner’s intelligence, although his personality remained aggressive. Using a gamma ray to transform at will, the Hulk was free to act as a full-fledged superhero, fighting the commie space robot Mongu and even becoming a founding member of the Avengers.

In his next, penultimate issue (Jan. 1963), the Hulk thwarted an invasion by the underground overlord Tyrannus, then bounced off to battle the Asian despot Gen. Fang while disguised as the Abominable Snowman.

The character would continue to evolve, and even relapse into villainy. When his title ended with the sixth issue, the Hulk shifted from reluctant protagonist in his own feature to formidable antagonist in other superheroes’ titles. The Marvel universe wasn’t about to let him go to waste.

When Batman Battled Superman Back in the Day

Having Batman battle Superman is not a new idea. The teammates clashed at various times during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

In stories like those in World’s Finest 95 (Aug. 1958) and World’s Finest 109 (May 1960), the creators sensibly realized that A) to credibly fight Superman, Batman would require super powers like the Man of Tomorrow’s and B) Batman would have to be deranged.

In other stories, when Superman, Batman and Robin plotted against each other, it was almost always for the purpose of protecting each other from some secret threat. The superheroes — being mature, responsible adults — weren’t given to murderous rage then, and their deep concern for each other was a running theme of World’s Finest.

Each decade had its super-team. In the 1940s, we had DC’s groundbreaking Justice Society of America and, all too briefly, Marvel’s All-Winners Squad. In the superhero-rich 1960s, we had the Justice League of America, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers and the X-Men.

And in the superhero-poor 1950s, we had the minimalist team: just Superman, Batman and Robin. And we were glad to get them.

I Liked the Lad Who Had the Lightning

When I was 6, my favorite member of the Legion of Super Heroes was Lightning Lad, for four reasons:

1)           He was the first of them I saw, when Jerry Siegel sent him to rescue Superboy from Luthor’s Army of Living Kryptonite Men (Superboy 86, Jan. 1961). The Boy from Tomorrow saved the doomed Boy of Tomorrow single-handedly, a deus ex machina if there ever was one.

2)          Unlike the other founding members, LL sported the necessary swashbuckling flourish of a CAPE, in addition to a cool midnight blue costume.

3)          He had interesting red hair. Ginger superheroes were quite a rarity. In fact, I remember being vaguely confused as to whether Lightning Lad might be the secret identity of Jimmy Olsen.

4)          He could project LIGHTNING BOLTS from his HANDS! As a child, I loved lightning and thunder, so what could possibly be better than projecting LIGHTNING BOLTS from your HANDS?

The onset of adulthood brought with it the disappointing realization that however cool it may look, hurling lightning bolts is of extremely limited utility in solving life’s problems. Steel girders just don’t fall on people all that often.

Years later, the immense popularity of the Legion to a new generation of children puzzled me. Unlike the JLA or the Avengers, the Legion seemed a particularly contrived business.

Why should all superheroes be teenagers? Why should almost all superheroes have only one power? And why should all superheroes who have more than one power have exactly the same set of powers, namely Superman’s? Silly stuff.

What I had missed was that for later readers, the feature neatly combined the adventurous spirit of superhero stories with the time-tested romantic appeal of school fiction (an element later exploited by Harry Potter).

The Man of Iron with a Heart of Glass

Stan Lee said he was surprised to learn that Iron Man was the favorite Marvel superhero of female readers, but it makes sense, really.

Tony Stark was rich and handsome and brave, all familiar ingredients for romantic fantasy. And he had another advantage. Literally, Stark had “a broken heart.” He had all the qualities to be some girl’s perfect mate, but he nobly refused to commit himself to any of them because he might die at any moment.

That poor, poor rich guy. Irresistible.

By the time Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck and Jack Kirby debuted Iron Man in Tales of Suspense 39 (March 1963), the outlines of what would become the Marvel Comics universe had emerged.

That same month, Ant-Man was battling the extra-dimensional tyrant Kulla and Thor was corralling the mobster Thug Thatcher (Funny. You’d have thought it would be the other way around). The Incredible Hulk, battling the Metal Master in his last issue, also crossed over to the Fantastic Four title to fight them. Meanwhile, in his first issue, Spider-Man also dropped in on the FF to put in a job application (after fighting them, of course). In his solo feature, the Human Torch got conned by criminal Carl Zante, the Acrobat, into leaving the FF briefly.

This interconnected Marvel universe, now established, was expanding into both future and past. Zante would return shortly with another con, disguising himself as a long-vanished hero named Captain America.

Each Marvel superhero was distinctive — a monster, a myth, a miniature man, an alienated teenager and now a knight in technological armor. Even the character’s initial bulky, robot-like armor was intriguing. Though hardly stylish, it was the opposite of the customary cape and tights.

Iron Man hit the ground running. By his third adventure, he was already proclaimed as world famous. He’d even repelled an alien invasion by the time-tested Silver Age method of convincing the invaders that everyone else on Earth was like him.

I liked Iron Man from the first, and years later came to realize that he was among the most morally admirable of the superheroes, who are all pretty good eggs, after all.

Like Batman and Adam Strange, Tony Stark had powers, strategies and solutions that came entirely out of his own head, that were created solely by his own determined efforts. Stark was American know-how on steroids.

That’s why the plot of the third Iron Man movie did not entirely work for me. Tony Stark would be the last superhero on Earth to fear that he’s being “taken over” by his heroic identity.

His abilities are not arbitrary. His fate is not accidental. Tony Stark was not bitten by a radioactive spider or blinded by radioactive chemicals. Iron Man is entirely his own conscious creation, his tool, and Stark knows that fact better than anyone.

Seeing Things Clearly in the Twilight Zone

How America Was Lied into War

George W. Bush’s CIA lapdog George Tenet admitted that Bush and Cheney lied us into the disastrous Iraq war.

Tenet wrote, “The leaders of a country decide to go to war because of core beliefs, larger geostrategic calculations, ideology and, in the case of Iraq, because of the administration’s largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East would be worth the price. WMD was, as Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair in May 2003, something that ‘we settled on’ because it was ‘the one issue that everyone could agree on.’”

Journalist Robert Scheer remarked, “The very idea that this country’s leaders can decide to go to war on the basis of their ‘core beliefs’ which they leave ‘unarticulated' while frightening the public with exaggerated claims makes a mockery of the notion of self-governance. Some would consider it an offense worthy of impeachment. As a tactic, panicking the citizenry with the phantom of Saddam’s WMD in the hands of 9/11-type terrorists is no different than Adolph Hitler blaming international Jewry and foreign communists for the Reichstag fire.”

Crimebuster: A Tough Teen Tackles Trouble

In 1942, Charles Biro’s Crimebuster anticipated a question that would help propel Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man to fame two decades later: Why wait until you’re an adult to become a superhero?

Like Spider-Man, the Boy Comics headliner was a teenager who wouldn’t be relegated to the sidekick sidelines. And like Batman, he was a child morally reforged in the murder of his parents.

Chuck Chandler was a surprisingly tough and effective character, even a grim one. A hockey star at Custer Military Academy, Chandler rushed from the rink to a hospital after learning that his journalist dad had been shot by a Nazi agent. His hockey jersey bearing the letter C, along with a military cape he’d quickly grabbed to keep warm, would become his superhero costume, such as it was.

Chandler was powerless when the Nazi agent, Iron Jaw, returned to murder his father and mother and a doctor in the hospital. That horror turned Chandler into a convincingly implacable enemy of crime.

Biro said that Chuck Chandler wasn’t a “super boy,” but just an ordinary American teenager with the stuff to get ahead. Biro’s opinion of American boyhood must have been exceedingly high, because Crimebuster routinely shrugged off death traps and gruesome torture while he beat criminal gangs into submission with the help of no one but a monkey, Squeeks. His bravery was unshakeable, and his level-headed focus on street-level crime gave him a no-nonsense air.

Part of what made Crimebuster so effective was the gravitas of his genuinely chilling archenemy Iron Jaw, so called because a French Resistance bomb had blown off the lower half of his face.

“Iron Jaw, a name that still raises the hair on the back of my neck,” comics historian R.C. Harvey recalled. “A champion baddie of the Golden Age, Iron Jaw may have been ahead of his time, the prototype of today’s soulless super-thugs. He was one of few transgressors who made encore appearances in those days. He was eventually motivated not by greed or by a desire for power (the entire gamut of motives for most villains until the Silver Age), but by the obsession to murder the good guy who repeatedly apprehended him and threw him in the hoosegow. Sometimes, instead of being captured, he died horribly in a ghastly conflagration, the inadvertent result of some scheme of his own gone awry. But he always escaped or came back to life (because he hadn’t really been killed; it only appeared that he had been). In all of this, as you can plainly see, he was a thoroughly modern — i.e., contemporary — villain.”

And, when the popularity of superheroes waned in the late 1940s, Crimebuster’s minimalist costume was easily doffed.

“As the genre fell out of favor with the comics reading public, his adventures took on human interest overtones,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “Eventually, things got so non-heroic, Squeeks got his own comic.”

“C.B. started wearing regular clothes because a girl told him he looked silly walking around in a hockey uniform all the time. His new outfit had roughly the same color scheme, and still displayed a big ‘C’ on the chest, but it looked more like a sports star’s letter (which, actually, it was all along) than a superhero insignia. The other kids still called him C.B. instead of Chuck — at least, until #112 (June 1955), when he apparently decided enough was enough. … C.B. went back to being Chuck Chandler, a name he hadn’t used in years, and remained Chuck Chandler for the rest of his days. Not that he had a whole lot of them left. Lev Gleason got out of the comic book business in 1956. The last issue of Boy Comics was #119, dated March of that year.

‘Marvel Comics (which had already appropriated the name of one Lev Gleason character, Daredevil) brought out a minor supporting character named Crimebuster in Nova #13 (Sept. 1977). This one never went anywhere, and was killed off a few years later.” Crimebuster’s more-than-respectable 14-year run had an interesting postscript. Pop artist Mel Ramos featured Crimebuster in a 1962 painting, and that was used for the cover of the 1996 album Evil Empire by the band Rage Against the Machine.